Cricket anthologies: unruffled by the Calypso Windrush
The rich tradition of cricket calypso and how it remains unappreciated
(extract from
Cricket Across Dark Waters
by Arunabha Sengupta)
It is not just a cliché to say that they reflected West Indian identity.
In ‘I’m a West Indian in Britain’ J.D. Douglas justified his inclusion in that community by serenading:
I think of home and carnival
long time since I saw bacchanal
I think of Worrell, Sobers and Griffiths
Lance Gibbs, Wes Hall and Rohan Kanhai
now even you can’t deny
I’m a West Indian in Britain.
The underlying socio-political currents were summarised by John Agard’s masterpiece about a White English batter facing a fast bowler from the Caribbean:
Prospero Batting
Caliban Bowling
and is cricket is cricket in yuh ricketics
but from far it look like politics
Cricket was seen as a part of the West Indian make up, an identity that they carried into England with the Windrush migrations. In Ways of Sunlight, Sam Selvon writes about the West Indian worker in a tyre factory in Chiswick, so caught up in his cricketing calypsos and inventions that he is asked to bring an eleven to play a local English side.
At the end of the 1966 tour, Kitchener sang England must understand/We are the champions During the 1963 series, he had chanted Bowl Griffith Bowl don’t stop at all.
Griffith had become an established Test star, and Ghulam’s strong and accusatory words in the aftermath of the Contractor injury had not managed to stall him. Even home umpires calling him for throwing had been overlooked. Clem Seecharan speculates that this was partly due to a still majorly White and light-skinned WICBC reticent to take a stand against a Black Barbados bowler in the prevailing political situation.
The British-Caribbean Agard, with his Afro-Portuguese roots, penned:
Sir Garfield was his name
and cricket was his game.
But hailing from Georgetown, Guyana, Agard also recalled the days of the 1960s:
“Out on the streets, perhaps choreographing a path between a taxi and a donkey cart, there was bound to be someone breezing by on a bicycle with that state-of-the-art talisman, the portable transistor stuck to one ear, and only too happy to update the world on the state of play, announcing with a glee a six or four, lamenting with a shake of head, ‘Kanhai just gone! Run out!’”
Even in the racially divided Guyana, with the Burnham regime, Kanhai’s magic remained a source of fascination for the Afro-Guyanese. For the Indo-Guyanese he was a bulwark of identity.
Sesanarine Persaud wrote about:
Kanhai in Calcutta and the swarm
of crowds, waves of Indian Ocean
roaring in the stands...
and explained what it meant.
with Jagan CIA-ed and raced from
office, with rainbows of rigged elections;
our 50 + 1% minoritied for years…
We made him Hanuman and sat on his shoulders
And of course, David Dabydeen immortalised his batting and the falling hook with the entire disturbed indentured history from the days of the White supervisors:
One ton cane-runs
Cropped, all day in hot sun the man cut
And drop on he back
To hook two and lash four
Hear the coolies crying out for more…
…to the 1960s of inter-racial strife
In the first such celebratory cricket calypso, written in 1928, Lord Beginner had hailed the early West Indian cricket hero: Who he was? Learie Constantine/That old pal of mine.
Apart from the above calypsos written between 1963 and 1966, Sparrow sang of Sir Garfield Sobers, the greatest cricketer on Earth or Mars. Down the years Lord Short Shirt would eulogise Viv Richards, Maestro would celebrate the 1975 World Cup win of Clive Lloyd’s team, whereas Alexander de Great, Superblue and de Fosto respectively would write Lash dem Lara, Signal for Lara and Four Lara Four to hail the later-day genius.
However, the calypso was not just to rejoice in success. Mighty Spoiler indulged in Picking Sense from Nonsense to find reasons for the defeat to Australia in 1951. Lord Relator simultaneously lauded Sunil Gavaskar’s batting and lamented the weak West Indian bowling of 1971. Sparrow mocked the White administrators Stollmeyer and Gomez while supporting the cause of Kerry Packer’s cricketing mercenaries. The simultaneous departure of the greats of West Indian cricket in the late 1980s saw David Rudder inviting people to Rally around West Indies. The emergence of post-apartheid South Africa, and their 1992 Test series versus the West Indies, led to an analysis of complex political and racial issues in MBA’s (Maestro Born Again) Beyond a Boundary.
As Curtly Ambrose succinctly put it: ‘Cricket and Calypso belong together’.
However, even though calypsos reverberated across the Caribbean islands and English grounds, with equal flair if unequal facility from Barbados to Brixton, the traditional pages of cricket remained rather unruffled by this wind-rush. When in 1981 David Rayvern Allen published A Song for Cricket, the 200-plus-page compilation of cricket songs included just four pages of calypso while the rest remained uniformly by English writers with a sprinkling of Australians. A few good and many not quite that good cricket poetry penned by Englishmen and a few Australians.
The whitewashed literary landscape is rather unbiased. Dom Moraes, the adroit Indian poet who penned verses on cricket, is also scrupulously ignored.